Its a human made machine. Perfection is a lot to ask for especially as the car has 125,000 miles on the clock. 😎

Is that all The taxi driver I use for airport runs has a Merc mini bus which has just gone over 600,000 and the only problem he's had is when someone cut his exhaust off whilst he was asleep (pipe cutter so no noise). When he had a new exhaust fitted, the engineer welded a steel rod along it so pipe cutters won't work now

In all fairness, anything can break down and you've had a good run so far and a bit of bad luck when it happened. I was only being a little cheeky what with it being a Merc and all

The breakdown resulted in Limp mode, 30mph job. The problem is in the automatic gearbox. It needs a part replacing, at a cost of £1900

Have to say its the second time in 5 years the gearbox has played up, we are looking into any warranties we might have. Its been a good car, and still looks good. The valuation may be as much as £3500 on a very good day, high mileage is the worst feature. It has always serviced at the Merc garage, and up to this year has had an extended warranty. Due to mileage, Merc have declined to continue that warranty a couple of months ago...

Many years ago I had a Renault Savannah, I managed to get the mileage up to 199,500 before that manual gearbox failed! I really wanted to get 200,000 out of it. Engine was still running well...

I recently had an issue with Merc which thankfully turned out much better. Car had a service (circa 65k miles, 14 yr old car, owned and MB serviced from new) and a hole was spotted in the rear subframe (MOT failure in Nov predicted). The bill: £1700 (picks self up off floor!). Spoke to service manager, asked her to see if MB would offer a goodwill payment and she eventually came back to say they would pay the lot - result!! I’ve always had excellent service from the dealer, particularly with one particular service manager who was off on maternity leave when this happened, so now I might have two tame contacts in local dealer.

That bad They are the easiest to get at the arrival lounge in Heathrow.

Vodafone is OK when it works, but their customer service is dire and they tell lies.

I bought a new handset outright form a Vodafone store a couple of years ago, and took out a basic contract for occasional use. I wasn't told at the time but the phone was locked to Vodafone who are now unable to provide an unlock code for it.

I could pay £50 or so for it to be unlocked but after two years I shouldn't need to. If you call Vodafone customer support they just tell you whatever it takes to get you off the phone in the full knowledge that the problem is not resolved.